In recent years, both legally binding requirements such as the UK Modern Slavery Act and voluntary guidelines such as the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, have been developed by international organisations and national governments with the goal to change the way in which businesses conduct their operations to address child and forced labour in their supply chains. Under the label “Human Rights Due Diligence” and in response to this changing regulatory environment, companies have started to put in place mechanisms enabling them to monitor human rights impacts in their supply-chains and to address those that are directly linked to the companies’ operations, products or services. In the smallholder agricultural sector, and in the cocoa sector in particular, Child Labour Monitoring Systems (CLMSs) have gained prominence due in part to the fact that their establishment became a requirement in the 2016 revised UTZ code of conduct and in the 2016 CocoaAction strategy from the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF). With such rising demand for this type of human rights due diligence systems and the need to scale them up rapidly, the International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) was mandated by its Board to review the different approaches existing in this area.
The objective of ICI’s Effectiveness Review of Child Labour Monitoring Systems in the Smallholder Agricultural Sector of Sub-Saharan Africa, is therefore to explore ways to increase the cost-effectiveness of Child Labour Monitoring Systems and to identify best practices to guide the establishment and scaling-up of monitoring systems in the smallholder agricultural sector. This Review of Emerging Good Practices, is the first stage of a larger process to gain insight into the cost-effectiveness of different CLMS approaches and to inform the second phase of the review (which is ongoing and shall be completed in 2018).
The information contained in this report originates from two main sources: on the one hand, a desk review of 25 publically-available reports and studies (see literature list in annex I) related to CLMS, and on the other, responses gathered through an online survey (see questionnaire in annex II), which was shared with a wide array of stakeholders operating a CLMS within and outside the cocoa sector, seven of which responded.
